Big time, p.22
Big Time, page 22
He did not catch the bullet, or dodge it. Whatever extraordinary capabilities were granted by the consumption of durational element, they were unavailing if the subject was looking the wrong way.
Ajax twitched and went still.
While the women watched, startled, Desiree swept the hard plastic case full of durational element off the table.
She held it aloft, and the fluid inside the vials sparkled gaily under Clare Stargell’s kitchen lights.
“Okay,” she said to Dr. Stargell. “On your feet.”
Grace watched in horror. She was having trouble breathing. No. No, no, no. Her eyes searched the floor for the gun she’d been holding when she came in here. The little black handgun she’d taken from Ana’s van.
“You are the creator of this technology?” the one-eyed woman asked Stargell. It was a statement that just barely curved up into a question as it reached its end. But Clare Stargell just gaped at her, confused.
The woman held her gun steadily on Stargell. “Yes or no?”
Dr. Stargell nodded rapidly, eyes wide, clutching the Formica countertop. Grace didn’t know what the one-eyed woman was going to do. Desiree grabbed Dr. Stargell tightly by the throat, lifted her from her chair, and walked her toward the door.
“Take me,” spat Ana.
“What?” said Desiree.
“I said take me, you fucking coward.”
“Take you?” Desiree looked at her curiously, as if the words made no sense to her in the current context. “No.” She tilted her head toward Stargell, whom she was still holding by the neck. “She will show me how to make more of this substance. I don’t need you.”
Grace understood what that meant: Desiree did not need Ana, and even less so did Desiree need Grace. She’s going to kill us, Grace thought simply, even as Desiree aimed at Ana. She’s going to kill us both.
And then Grace lurched into motion, throwing her body at Desiree and screaming as she did, screaming from adrenaline and nervousness and pure holy fear.
It was crazy. There should not have been enough time. Not even close. Desiree was a trained killer and she was six feet away. Desiree should have been able to shoot Grace easily as Grace charged screaming toward her.
But it was as if Grace had taken the durational element, as if the universe had folded more time into her own, and the moment stretched out. It yawned open, time within time, and she collided with Desiree and knocked her off balance the instant before she pulled the trigger and so her bullet went wild, even as Grace pushed Stargell down and covered the old woman’s body with her own and Ana grabbed Stargell’s rifle from the kitchen floor in time—just in time—to return fire.
Desiree felt the bullet enter her stomach. The impact drove her backward and her head smacked against the wall. As she sank down, she felt blood gushing from the wound, and she clutched her hands across her stomach, the fingers of her right hand interlacing with the fingers of her left, forming a poor barrier against the gout of blood from the hole torn in her center.
She felt herself draining from herself. It might take as much as forty-five minutes for her to die, she knew, but given the severity of the injury and the speed with which blood and thus oxygen were flowing away from her brain, she was likely to lose consciousness in under a minute.
No escape, thought Desiree finally. There is no escape.
Grace lay on the ground not far from her, shaking with pain. It felt like she’d been shot but she had not been shot. She’d just done something very bad to her back when she’d lunged for Desiree. She lay supine, staring up at the ceiling.
It was excruciating, the pain twisting like a hot cable down the length of her body.
Dr. Stargell was panting beside her. Grace couldn’t turn her head to see if Ana was okay. She hoped that she was. Poor thing had gone through a lot already.
“Dr. Stargell, can you call the police?” Grace managed. “Can you do that?”
“Yes,” said Stargell. “Yes.”
Grace could see the clock with the cat’s tail out of the corner of her eye, and she tried to focus on it. Each swish of the tail was a second passing. She felt the hard floor underneath her head. She let the moment surround her. She let time pass.
EPILOGUE:
SIX MONTHS IN THE FUTURE
Nana, come on. Don’t be a jerk. Turn the sound back on.”
“Ech,” said Kathy. “What the hell are we even watching this for?”
“Are you kidding?”
“If we switch over, we can watch Judge Judy instead.”
“You’re such a jerk.”
Kathy shrugged. They were going to sit here and watch goddamn C-SPAN, of all things? She stared with annoyance at the still shot of a congressional hearing room. Bunch of old farts wandering around in suits, yapping about this or that bull crap. Pretending to be important.
“Mom is testifying before Congress,” said River. “You don’t think we might want to check that out?”
Kathy rolled her eyes. “We already know what she’s going to say.”
River rolled their eyes back at her, but it was true. Grace had rehearsed her testimony a hundred times, standing in here in this stale small room where Kathy was laid up like a lump of ham, reading from her cue cards while River cheered her on or made nitpicky suggestions.
River snatched the remote and unmuted the TV, and Kathy harrumphed and resettled herself on her pillows.
It was bad enough she was stuck here in this hospital in the stink of other people’s piss, pestered all day long by these daffy nurses who could barely speak the language.
It was the damnedest thing. She’d been changing lanes on Wootton Parkway, driving back from the CVS where she’d gone to do one quick errand, to pick up some Epsom salts for her bath. Grace was supposedly going to get the salts on her way home from work, but she didn’t want to wait until seven or eight or God knows when to take a bath, and why the hell should she when she had a car and she was perfectly capable of driving the damn thing? Well, of course some redneck bozo in a pickup truck cut right in front of her, and she’d lost track of her hands on the wheel and spun off the road and woken up here.
And somehow or other, everybody had decided it was her fault, especially her daughter, who kept saying she was just glad Kathy was okay and that they had health insurance and all the other shit she was supposed to say, even though Kathy could just see the words I told you so dying to pop out.
“I was going to go to the store” was what Grace kept saying. “I was going to get you the salts.”
No matter that the accident really and truly had not been her fault. That redneck SOB had flustered her, honking and shouting and trying to get around, and her damn car was all poky and unresponsive because Grace never let her drive it!
None of it mattered, of course. She knew damn well what it meant. Even as she lay here in this bed, enduring another week of tests and scans, watching the blotchy bruises on her body go from black to purple, she knew that she would never drive again. Her identity had changed forever. For almost sixty years, she had been a person who drove a car, who even was good at it and loved it, and now she would never be that person again. She had slipped from the shore of that identity into the open sea of this new one: old lady in a hospital bed waiting to be driven home, driven to the store, driven everywhere.
And it wasn’t like you went back. You move from one of life’s countries to another one, and you never go back.
“There she is! Holy shit,” said River. And then Kathy saw her daughter on TV, and Kathy began to cry.
Grace Berney, moving carefully, plainly nervous, was being led to a seat at a long table behind a little placard with her name on it while one of the younger of the old farts spouted off pompously. Ana Court was seated beside her, thin and nervous and apparently chewing gum.
“It’s especially distressing when you consider that the regulatory bodies that should have been providing oversight were nowhere to be seen,” the man said. “In all of government, there seems to have been exactly one person who was curious about this.”
Suddenly Kathy’s daughter’s face filled up the television screen, smiling uncertainly. Kathy blew her nose and said, “Ugh.” Grace was wearing too much makeup. She looked like a clown. Who told her to dress that way to be on television?
Behind Kathy, River cheered.
“Go, Mom!”
“Hush,” said Kathy. “I’m watching.”
“Oh, now you’re watching.”
“I said quiet, child.” Kathy belched softly, then watched in silence as her daughter was formally invited to make her introductory remarks to the Senate committee.
“My name is Grace Berney, and I work at CDRH, the Center for Devices and Radiological Health, part of the Food and Drug Administration. The woman beside me is Ana Jessica Court, and I believe you will hear from her a little bit later on.”
Grace was reading a prepared statement, and Kathy winced to see Grace’s hands shaking slightly as she held her papers. A few beads of sweat appeared just below her hairline.
“There you go, honey,” whispered Kathy. “You’re all right. You’re doing great.”
“Nana? You say something?”
“Hush.”
“Are you crying?”
“No, River. Hush.”
“It was through my work at CDRH that I first became aware of the existence of what is now being referred to as DE, or the durational element. The, uh—the—”
She paused, flushed, and looked down at her notes, seemingly confused.
“Come on, kid,” growled Kathy. “Come on.”
On the TV, Grace cleared her throat. She steadied her hands. It was like she could hear her mom.
She flipped to the other side of her paper and kept reading, peering at it closely to avoid looking up, and eventually she found a kind of rhythm, flipping forward page by page as she told her story. Sometimes the idiots on the committee interrupted to ask questions or make short dumb speeches in the guise of questions, but for the most part they just listened.
“I wish she would talk more slowly,” said Kathy at one point, and River said, “Nah. She’s doing great.”
Kathy harrumphed, allowing it. She couldn’t say anything else for the moment; she was overfilled. Tears ran down her old cheeks in hot narrow lanes, and her breast was choked with a happiness that was a kind of pain. Her own child was appearing as a hero, and she had lived long enough to see this, and she would not live forever, which was unbearable, but okay too.
“Nana?” said River, crouching next to her. “You all right?”
“She oughta try and sit up straight. She’s on television, for Chrissake.”
As the hearing wore on, Kathy became tired and began to drift in and out of sleep. At some point, Grace concluded her testimony, and other people were invited up, one by one. First Ana Court, then a series of experts, various kinds of scientists. A man from the FDA named Barry Perez stammered out a series of incoherent answers in response to pressing questions about the relationship between his office and “this man, Ajax, who we have heard so much about.”
A tweedy and professorial gentleman with the unlikely name of Jeffrey Wingo, from the National Institutes of Health, accompanied his testimony with a tripartite chart showing illustrations of deep space, diagrams of the human genome, and a blur of mathematical equations.
And though Kathy MacAlister had taken enormous pride in Grace’s testimony, and though she could have fooled herself into confusing that pride with hope, she was no dummy.
She saw where it all was, and she understood where it was going.
The senators in their mortuary suits, with their thundering glowers, were going to rant and rave, they were going to demand accountability from the FDA and punishment for those involved in letting this illegal, exploitative, and potentially catastrophic experimentation occur out of the public eye and for private profit. And Grace Berney would be lauded until the cows came home for her resourcefulness and courage in revealing this illicit scientific activity.
But now it was public. Kathy let her eyes drift closed. She couldn’t watch anymore. She couldn’t bear it.
Now all had been revealed. The world knew about it, and everybody would gnash their teeth and tear at their hair, but one thing Kathy knew was that there was no driving the horse back into the barn.
The science of it was above her pay grade, but Kathy understood a few things about the world. She had known a lot of people. Bosses and workers, owners and renters, liars and thieves. She knew what happened next. Time had become a thing to which value could be assigned, and anything with value would be bought and sold, it would be stolen and hoarded, it would be leveraged and bundled and amortized.
The ending had been built into the beginning. The worst outcome had become a possibility, and all possibilities become real if you wait long enough.
Kathy mumbled, and River said, “Nana, are you okay?” and she couldn’t answer. Her husband had died in an accident in a coal mine. Her parents hadn’t had the money for her to finish college. Five years from now, poor people would be selling the hours of their lives to buy insulin or asthma medication or gas for their cars.
Ten years from now, it would be worse than that.
Kathy drifted off to sleep until the congressman leading the hearing banged the gavel for quiet, and the chamber was filled with the low hum of a motor. The hum came from an electric wheelchair that was maneuvering slowly into the room.
The man in the chair had thick white hair and a plump, cheerful face. He drove slowly up to the witness table, stopped, and adjusted the stack of papers on the table before him. He conferred with a small cluster of sharply dressed lawyers assembled around him. Ahead of his pending criminal trial, he’d posted an enormous sum in bail and had been released on his own recognizance. Meanwhile the grand jury’s investigation into his role in the development of the durational-element technology was running in parallel with this congressional investigation, so it was understood that there were certain questions that Mr. Ajax would not be at liberty to answer.
But to look at him, adjusting the chair into position behind the table, grinning, with his sleeves rolled up, Martin Ajax hardly seemed reluctant to testify.
“Mr. Chairman,” he said. “Good morning. If I may begin?”
“Turn it off,” said Kathy to River. “Turn the damn thing off.”
River raised the remote to do so as Ajax looked directly into the camera and the future he’d made.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks first and foremost and always to Diana, Rosalie, Orchid, and Milly. I don’t know what I would do without you.
Thanks to Joelle Delbourgo and Joel Begleiter, agents and friends.
I read a lot of delightfully strange stuff while I was writing this one. I am particularly indebted to James Gleick’s Time Travel, Richard Muller’s Now: The Physics of Time, and the fantastic anthology The Time Traveler’s Almanac. If I work backwards, the first kernel of Big Time was in the Twilight Zone episode “A Most Unusual Camera.” Highly recommended.
Thanks to James McKinney at the FDA for the walkthrough on medical-device regulation. Thanks to old friends Ray Scholl and Sarah Leshner Carvalho, both of whom provided fascinating insight on areas of expertise that didn’t end up in the novel. (In a parallel universe, Ray, there’s still a small aircraft crash landing in here somewhere.)
This book is dedicated to my editor, Josh Kendall, who seems always to know where I’m trying to get before I do. He and his colleagues at Mulholland make it a joy.
Onwards!
—Ben Winters, Los Angeles 2023
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Ben H. Winters is the New York Times bestselling author of Underground Airlines, Golden State, and the Last Policeman trilogy, among other works. His books have won the Edgar Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, the Sidewise Award, and France’s Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire. Ben also writes for television and lives in Los Angeles with his family.
Also by Ben H. Winters
The Quiet Boy
Underground Airlines
Golden State
The Last Policeman Trilogy
The Last Policeman
Countdown City
World of Trouble
Bedbugs
Android Karenina
Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters
Ben H. Winters, Big Time
